Murder on the Orient ExpressReview

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Agatha Christie's classic in interactive form, though it still feels like a book.

By Charles Onyett

For the gamer that prefers a more confined adventure game on a less than epic scale, Murder on the Orient Express delivers, though not without a few issues. Based on the Agatha Christie book of the same name, the game lets you play as train company representative Antoinette Marceau, a character included specifically for the game. Originally assigned by Marcel Bouc to ensure detective Hercule Poirot's safe and comfortable passage on the Express, she soon finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery. Poirot sprains his ankle on the train after an avalanche blocks the tracks. It's up to Antoinette, or more specifically you, to piece together a number of clues and cross examine all the train's passengers in order to bring about the conclusion of the famous tale.

Fans of the book will find much familiar in the game, including characters like Colonel Arbuthnot, Dr. Constantine, and Hildegarde Schmidt. For anyone not acquainted with the story, the game actually comes with a copy of the book. Kicking off in Istanbul, Turkey in 1934, you have to wade through a few boring puzzles before getting on the train. Once you're moving on the rails, the game picks up a bit, but the pace never really speeds along. Part of the leisurely flow of the game is its design, which focuses heavily on conversation, but is also an unfortunate after effect of its puzzle structure.

Playing Murder on the Orient Express at many times feels like reading a novel as extended dialogue exchanges with multiple characters eat up numerous gameplay hours. Such conversations make sense within the context of the game, since Antoinette is investigating a murder committed onboard the train and needs to collect everyone's alibis. The conversations would have been far more interesting if they offered more in the way of consequence. As it is, a conversation involves clicking on a character and exhausting conversation options one at a time. Information gleaned from suspects is always the same, regardless of what order you ask the questions. This functions to make selecting dialogue options the equivalent of turning pages of a book. If you were actually reading a book this would be fine, but in a game it just doesn't work as well. Had there been an opportunity to choose conversation branches that had varying affects on how subsequent events played out, this could have been more engaging.

Antoinette collects a large variety of items over the course of the game, a few of which can be combined or decoupled. Figuring out exactly what items need to be manipulated can be difficult toward the later stages of the game, since all the items you pick up remain in your inventory. This can make the process of trial and error combinations tedious, though most of their solutions tend to make sense. It doesn't help that the option to combine is a separate menu tab, requiring you to switch back and forth while adding the items you need. To progress through the game's three parts, Antoinette will need to comb the train in search of items, clues, fingerprints, and passports. Many of these are easy to miss, meaning you'll be doing a lot of backtracking through the train, combing over areas you've already searched to find that one shelf, suitcase, or wooden box that you'd passed over before.

What does remain interesting is how the story unfolds based on what kinds of evidence you've uncovered, and how characters change around their stories to reveal new bits of information. Though Antoinette acts as the collector, it's Poirot who puts most of the pieces together and extrapolates conclusions. Fans will note that he eventually comes up with three explanations for what happened instead of the two advanced in the book. Even so, the conclusions are presented in a linear fashion where it's impossible to get anything wrong, since you're required to have the items necessary for their explanation to even get to that point. You can put forth theories at the end, but even if you choose the wrong bit of information the game will just give you the option to try again until the correct one is chosen. This kind of device really takes away from the notion that you're affecting the game world, but rather following a laundry list of obligations.

Limiting the setting to a five car train and a few outdoor zones is one of the game's strongest features, since it provides a sense of intimacy not present in most adventure titles. There's a convenient feature that lets you instantly skip between any of the five cars, somewhat alleviating the burden of combing the train. As far as the menus go, they're fairly clunky, though there's a welcome amount of extra information embedded within. The documents tab is of particular interest, giving you the ability to check the timetable of events, maps, special challenges, instructions from Poirot, and profiles on each of the game's characters.

While some of the train's interiors look sharp, the character models lack detail and animate awkwardly. Cinematics pop up fairly frequently, though they suffer from noticeable pixilation due to compression. Even though it's not among the most visually appealing adventure games out there, it's still easy enough to identify which items can be interacted with. The sound is better, mostly because of the generally well done voice acting. A few of the characters sound artificial, but there's a large volume of voice work here and it generally gets the job done. Music is sparse, and so are the sound effects, which aren't all that entertaining unless you're absolutely obsessed with the sound of an idling steam engine.

The Verdict

Basing an adventure game on a novel can ensure it has an interesting narrative but also threatens to make it feel like less of a game and more an interactive story. Such is the case with Murder on the Orient Express. There are a number of puzzles to be solved in this game, but some of them require solutions that will take quite a bit of trial and error inventory combinations to solve. Character interactions are numerous, but so linear in their progression it makes it feel as though you're turning pages in a book than affecting a game world. While the limited setting actually strengthens the sense of community between the game's characters, it's surprising how often you'll have to revisit each and every area to find clues and items required to advance. Problems aside, there's still a decent adventure experience to be had with this game, though its strongest quality is simply that it's different from most of its ilk, not better.